Prime Minister Theresa May "It's This Deal or No deal." | This Morning

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After all these years I still don’t understand. The more I think about it, the more perplexed I become. She’s currently telling interviewers that she saw herself as trying to navigate a center ground between two extremes. At this she failed because the two “extremes,” in her postulation, united against her. One group thought that voting down her deal would secure no deal, the other thought it would stop Brexit. Had either believed the other was right, it would have supported her as the lesser of two evils. The former group had far more Tories. The latter had a handful (fewer as the saga went on and many of them crossed the floor) but it was the former that were breaking down party discipline. As Tory leader it was her responsibility to get them to toe the line. The latter group was mostly opposition MPs, she should not have counted on them to throw her a lifeline by voting to enable something they didn’t want anyway. She didn’t even try to win them over, not really, not till it was much too late and she was a sad little lame duck. She ruled out No Brexit but not No Deal. That didn’t win over the No Brexit crowd because they didn’t believe her. And why should they? A prime minister hadn’t looked this weak since the Norway Debate. Worse, it meant the No Deal crowd had no reason-none!-to come around to her deal. They need just wait her out and the prize would fall into their lap. She should have done it the other way around: Vote for my deal or I cancel Brexit. No second referendum, whose result would have been as inconclusive as the snap election. Just a straight-up revocation of Article 50. She had it in her power. By the end it was the _only_ action in her power. The ERG folks would have had to take her seriously. The DUP would have been in a position that would have made it impossible to oppose her. She loses a few Remainer Tories, but that would be offset; Labour had enough Brexiteers that they wouldn’t all vote for a de facto revocation. Corbyn could never have commanded that much unity if he’d tried, and I’m not at all sure he would have; I can see a lot of Labour MPs abstaining en masse, and Corbyn comes off looking like he’s the one who doesn’t know which way is up. May wins big and cements her place in history as the one who steered the ship through the storm into a safe harbor. Nor is this hindsight. I sensed this was true at the time, though I had yet to work through all the details of different scenarios. I just wish she could have seen it!